Recently, I wrote on the pulling away of many brands and businesses from using social media as a customer service medium. Brands have been questioning the success they would find in communicating with their customers through social media sites, and often with good reason. However, those brands that do still consider social media as a great way to communicate with customers depend more on certain consumers than they do others. Perhaps one of the best ways to use social media for marketing is to use it to help in developing an online reputation with consumers, and the best way to do that is to monitor the activity of “brand connected consumers.”
These “brand connected consumers,” or BCCs for short, are those online consumers that post on a brand’s page or talk about a brand on social media quite a bit more than others do. To be specific, those that are considered BCCs are consumers to post or mention a brand at least once a week. According to a survey from JWT, OgilvyAction, and EXPO, about 8 out of 10 consumers engage with brands digitally on social media and only a quarter of consumers are BCCs. If keeping up an online reputation is the name of the game, then BCCs play a bigger role than anyone and according to an article from Marketing Charts, they need their feedback to be heard.
In the survey, about 80% of BCCs feel that one of the most important things that they expect from brands that they engage with on brand pages is that their feedback be acknowledged. After that, 75% of consumers believe that it is important for their feedback to be acknowledged on review sites, and 70% believe the same about feedback on their own personal social pages. The article reports a separate result from another survey that states that 70% of consumers will stop buying from a brand if they do not respond to negative feedback.
However, here is the good news;
Brand-connected consumers do appear confident that their voices are seen and valued. Roughly 8 in 10 believe that brands see their posts on social network pages and review sites, and a similar proportion believe brands value the information they provide in those locations.
So, overall consumers are happy with the way their interactions with brands over social media are performing, but it is definitely something that needs to be watched. To back that fact up even further, the article from Marketing Charts provides a few more bits of information. About 25% of the time consumers are unsatisfied with interactions, they will cut off any future plans to buy from that brand. However, when they are satisfied, four out of ten end up buying more from the brand, and a fifth will buy from a brand for their first time ever. So, with these facts in mind, social marketers or brands with social media presence should take care to acknowledge what consumers are saying to them or about them, especially in the cases of those consumers who do so the most.
